Archive for December, 2006

I’m grateful for the lessons I’ve learned this year. I’m grateful that I took the opportunity to jump full-time into custom web application development, quitting my day job at Vibe Solutions Group to pursue my goal of having ownership in the projectsthatIworkon. Even though everything hasn’t yet worked out how I had envisioned, I feel that I’m much stronger in many key areas. I’ve seen a lot of successes so far and am looking forward to many more in 2007.

I’m grateful for all the dog walks I’ve gotten to take with Kuma at 2:00 am in the morning in Tower Grove Park. It’s a quiet time, usually there is nobody else in the park at that hour. I’m grateful that Collabofit is at a stage where I can use it to help motivate me each day to take my 2.2 mile walk, get outside, breathe some fresh air, and enjoy the magnificent resource that is Tower Grove Park.

I’m grateful that my wife Kristin finished a illustrating a new book — Shepherd, Show Me — for our church that finally puts pictures to the hymn that every child learns first – Shepherd, Show Me How To Go. I’m also grateful that she will be showing a major exhibition of her artwork at Northwest Coffee in Clayton, exhibiting her latest Mozart paintings that continue her Letters to Mozart series.

I’m grateful to have been able to attend my brother Andy’swedding and to serve as his best man. It was an honor and a joy. It was also a pleasure to visit Andy and Val in Florida for Thanksgiving this year. Val did an excellent job of preparing the feast.

I’m grateful for the progress on our Kitchen Project and am looking forward to it being completed. It is turning out wonderful, bit by bit.

I’m grateful that we had the opportunity to visit our good friend Michael up in Alaska in March when he was still living there and do some cross crountry skiing, snow shoeing and freeze our noses off.

I’m pleased to announce the release of a major facelift for RSS2.com – the site that makes reading a feed easier than ever. The new design places emphasis on easy reading of content – using Georgia as the default reading font, em sizing so that fonts can be increased or decreased properly in all browsers, the ability to vote an entry up or down and thereby influence the RSS feed score for a given RSS feed.

We just added 10 new activities to Collabofit, including a special new one: VIDEOGAMES!!!

* Videogames???
Here are the top 3 reasons why we think it’s useful to track your time playing videogames using Collabofit:

Lots of people love playing videogames, and it is common to actually work up a sweat while playing them. i.e. there is _some_ fitness benefit (we think…)

By treating videogames as a fitness activity worth tracking, hopefully people who like to play videogames will look at some of the other activities you can track using Collabofit, and will realize that something as simple as taking a walk is worth more points than playing videogames. Maybe the same competitive drive that leads some players to play for hours on end will also lead them to get out and do something else useful with their time and get some sweet fitness points for doing so. And that’s a good thing, right?

What other fitness site actually gives you points for playing videogames? How cool is that!

If you want an invite, email gserafini [at] gmail.com with the subject: “Gimme a Collabofit Invite Please” and we’ll hook you up. (Open public signup is coming soon, but sending us an email so we can send you an invite is currently the only way you can get an account.)

Now get your Dance Dance Revolution on and Wii your way to a slimmer trimmer you!

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Update: I’m now hosting this file here in the hopes that it can be useful to others since the original link doesn’t work anymore. Please note: I cannot provide ANY support for this. I didn’t write it. You should read through the options carefully before running this on your machine. That being said, it did work for me at the time, so hopefully it will work for you as well.

After copying an IMAP account from one server to another I ran into this same problem. The bash script that is supplied worked perfectly for me to fix the problem. They give example scripts for both BSD and Linux.

Fixing mail.app’s IMAP date problem

There is one last problem with mail.app that I finally got around to fixing today. When I upgraded to Tiger my IMAP accounts didn’t upgrade well so I deleted them and added them again. That fixed the connection and synchronization problems but introduced the IMAP Date problem.

The IMAP Date problem is the result of how mail.app figures out the Date Received time for an email. Rather than using the Date: header in the email it uses the time the file was written to the file system. This becomes a problem when files are copied to a new location on the server and the creation time of the file is changed. When the entire contents of a Maildir is copied to a new location this can cause all emails to display with the wrong date and time!

The solution is to change the time stamp of each email message that is wrong. The process is:

Get the Date: header from the email message

Compare it to the file system time stamp

If they are different, change the time stamp to the date in the email

Here is the shell script that accomplishes this. All that needs to be done is to point it at a user’s Maildir and it will handle the rest. A word of warning, this script is likely far from perfect. I did run it on my own Maildir and it fixed about 16,000 emails in about 3 minutes.

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So, I recently found out that the version of PHPList that we were using on a client site (2.10.2) had a nasty bug in it where it would convert all URLs in a text version of an email message to lowercase. This bug is fixed in the latest version (2.10.3) but it left a number of subscribers complaining that the links in their email were broken.

I wrote this handy bash script to fix those links for emails that had already been sent out.

To use this script, follow these steps on your server command line. This is a bash script.

First, copy this code to your clipboard:

#!/bin/sh

# This script takes the contents of a directory and will make a copy
# of every file converting any uppercase characters to lowercase
# (Useful because PHPList had a bug where it converted URLs to
# lowercase in text-only mailing list messages and the links were
# therefore broken. This script will enable those links to work.)

for file in *
do
if [ -f "$file" ]; then
filelower=`echo $file | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]"`
if [ -f "$filelower" ]; then
echo "You are trying to copy a file that has the same name as an existing file."
echo "$filelower file was NOT copied."
echo ""
else
if [ -d "filelower" ]; then
echo "You are trying to copy a file that has the same name as an existing directory - $filelower"
echo "$filelower file was NOT copied."
echo ""
else
# not a file or directory. make a copy of the file
cp "$file" "$filelower"
fi
fi
fi
done

Next, you are going to create a bash script file.

$ vi cp_files_to_lowercase.sh

Press i and then paste in the code.

Press ESC then :wq to write the file and quit vi.

Next you are going to set the executable permission on the file.

$ chmod 700 cp_files_to_lowercase.sh

Next, change directory to the place you want to run the script on. In this case, we’ll change to the images directory.

$ cd images/

Let’s see what’s in the directory currently:

$ ls

$ Image1.jpg IMAGE2.jpg image3.jpg

Now run the script.

$ ../cp_files_to_lowercase.sh

The script will make a copy of any file that has an uppercase character in it and name it the same thing except all lowercase. It will tell you if the file already exists as a completely lowercase file (it won’t copy a file onto itself).

Now let’s see what it did:

$ ls

$ Image1.jpg image1.jpg IMAGE2.jpg image2.jpg image3.jpg

Now any URLs should work and any previous text-version emails that were sent out using the old version of PHPList should now have working links again.

DISCLAIMER: This script will copy files on your server. I am not responsible for any problems that this causes. I’ve tested this on my server, but you’d be wise to test what will happen first. If you add an echo in front of the cp command in the script you will see displayed what it would do without actually doing it.

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